According to research done by @stake, Palms are becoming more and more vulnerable to hacker attacks, and they should not be trusted to store confidential and important information. In addition, the company says that companies need to be careful what information they disseminate on PDAs as they continue to enter the business world, not to mention how many wireless options via the Palm (Bluetooth and 802.11b) have been shown lately that can be easily compromised. Read more here. Joel's Note: No real insight here but definitely worth reading about how vulnerable your Palm or other PDA is. The other day I was reading about how vulnerable my PC is since it's on the 'Net at all times without a firewall. The more articles I read about how my systems are vulnerable, the more desensitized I become.

For use within a corporate environment, you can route through a firewall (I do that at home with my iPAQ and 802.11b setup– doing it at the office is no big deal).

In terms of encryption, if you're sending confidential info over the wire (again: in a corporate environment) you'd be stupid not too implement *your own* encryption (i.e. before hitting the wire).

As for those guys driving around town intercepting packets wirelessly– so what? They're just sniffing packets something that we've *always* been able to do (as long as networks have been around) irrespective of, “physical” connection.

The trick is to *expect* people to see your communication. Once you get it into your head that everything you do can be intercepted, you can see the benefits of your own internal encryption. If you work solely with standard for non-standard information (i.e. your confidential corporate data), you are an idiot.

That's why things like SSH, PGP and RSA are around guys… - by Minus~1

Free Firewalls(9:19am EST Fri Aug 17 2001)If your PC is connected all the time why not install one of the free firewalls like ZoneAlarm? Gives you some protection for nothing, and in fact makes your PC invisible to most sniffers. Seems to be a no-brainer to me. - by Nick

re: Nick(9:58am EST Fri Aug 17 2001)Probably because ZoneAlarm doesn't make a version for the Palm OS.

I actually don't care if my PDA (a Jornada handheld) is hacked I just store any important information on a flash card that I don't install whem I'm on the wireless.

Even if somebody does get into it, unless they've found a way to physically damage the device or write to the ROM, a hard reboot puts it back to the factory settings. - by Ziwiwiwiwiwiwwiwiwi